Sky Media Elevates Search Behaviour Targeting Through Captify Partnership

Last year, Sky Media launched Search Behaviour Targeting, allowing brands, for the first time, to target TV audiences based on online search behaviours. Following strong advertiser uptake, Sky Media has enhanced its partnership with Captify, the leader in real time audiences and insights fuelled by search intelligence, offering even more granular and bespoke targeting for brands.

With 1.5 billion UK searches tracked each month, the number of categories available for advertisers has more than doubled to eighteen off-the-shelf audiences, meaning greater targeting options and granularity. Alongside this, sectors such as ‘Holidays’ and ‘Home Improvement,’ have been introduced. Sky Media has also enabled bespoke audiences through a custom request process.

This allows advertisers to tap into Captify’s extensive list of custom categories, including everything from ‘Pet and Animal’ Interests to ‘Real Estate’ and ‘Fantasy Sport;’ combining Captify’s custom categories to create a bespoke target audience for their campaign.

Brands such as British Airways Holidays have utilised the ‘Travel’ search behaviours to expand their campaigns to reach active holiday seekers, as well as kitchen retailers who have targeted those looking to improve their homes.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) were one of the first advertisers to embrace Sky Media’s Search Behaviour Targeting to great success for their prison officer recruitment campaign. AdSmart enabled the MoJ to reach households that had been searching online for ‘Jobs’ and ‘Education’ in the last month, combined with regional targeting around key prison recruitment areas. As a result, the MoJ saw a 170% uplift in prompted ad recall from those exposed to the ads versus the unexposed audience, which was a 24.3%pt uplift.

Ben Stack, Ministry of Justice’s deputy director of recruitment & retention communications, said, “Targeting our advertising in this innovative and effective way delivers better value for the taxpayer and allows our campaign investment to go further – having a real-world impact on our work to protect the public.”

The partnership will allow for targeting across both linear and on demand content across hundreds of Sky Media channels.

Rishi Chande, SVP of global strategy & business development at Captify said, “We are delighted by the growing demand from Sky Media’s clients to use Captify search data to reach desired target audiences. We are working closely with the Sky Media team to improve the targeting and attend to the demands of their different clients. This partnership means a step forward of bringing the digital world to the TV and helping clients such as the Ministry of Justice to reach TV audiences as never before.”

Dan Cohen, director of product & advertising innovation at Sky Media said, “Our effort to bring the best capabilities of digital to the brand-safe, big screen world of TV has been recognised by our clients, through their adoption of Search Behaviour Targeting. The Ministry of Justice is an excellent example of this. We listen to our client's needs and have worked hard to improve our offering to cater to more clients and our partnership with Captify is a great example of this.